The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier (43 page)

These outcomes were not just a question of privileged parents choosing schools with great teachers (tax returns in hand, the researchers stripped out the effects of family income). No, the lesson is that we have underestimated the power of interaction. A great teacher can change a child’s future. “That’s especially true for needy kids, who often get the weakest teachers. That should be the civil rights scandal of our time,” Nicholas Kristof writes in a column describing how a perspicacious teacher transformed the future of one Olly Neal, once “a poor black kid with an attitude,” who ultimately became an American appeal court judge. Noticing the back-talking sixteen-year-old Neal steal a book with a racy cover from the school library, the teacher, Mildred Grady, used her own time and money to ensure there would always be a new novel by that author on the shelf, secretly stoking what became Neal’s lifelong reading habit.
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We may not pay them well or respect them as much as we do Internet barons like Mark Zuckerberg or Sergey Brin. But if a gifted teacher can turn resistant kids into readers—if an excellent teacher can be parachuted into a class and learning and achievement spike
as a result—then we should start investing at least as much in teachers’ wetware as we do in software and hardware.

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Make parent, teacher, and peer interaction the priority for preschoolers and young children. Combine live teaching with online tools for older children and teens.

FACE-TO-FACE CONTACT AND THE CLASS DIVIDE

The reason I mention the Olly Neal story is that being educated by a wonderful teacher who cares about you may soon become a thing of the past, especially for kids from poor backgrounds. There is a growing opportunity gap between middle-class and working-class kids in North America and Europe. Financially comfortable kids now get reams of what political scientist Robert Putnam calls “
Goodnight Moon
time,” compared to children from less affluent backgrounds. To wit, college-educated parents now spend four times as much time, energy, and money on their kids as their parents did in the seventies. During that same time span, high school–educated, often financially pinched parents have barely increased the resources and attention they devote to their kids. This activity and attention gap was less dramatic three to four decades ago. Now the rich–poor rift in reading and math test scores is about 40 percent larger.
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Given that providing a virtual education is cheaper than training excellent teachers, I fear that the push toward digital classrooms will exaggerate this class divide. This is not scaremongering. School laptop programs, virtual classrooms, and MOOCs (massive open online courses) are often floated as magic bullets for underprivileged or underserved school populations, whether in Birmingham, Alabama, or Fort Portal, Uganda. MOOCs have gained traction at a galloping pace. Slickly produced virtual courses have generated astronomical registration rates, with students in some courses
numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Yet the reality of an interaction-free education is sobering. On average, 90 percent of these students drop out. Only 3 percent of MOOC students say they feel satisfied with the experience. Without a schedule or any classroom structure, lacking the opportunity to ask questions or receive any encouragement or personal evaluation, it is poor, inexperienced, or disenfranchised students—precisely the ones targeted by many MOOC promoters—who are the ones most likely to flounder and fade away.
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Meanwhile, parents and students who can afford it are moving in the opposite direction, paying a premium for real human contact with well-trained teachers in small classrooms, teachers who offer plenty of guided discussion, individualized instruction, and hands-on opportunities to learn.

Investing in tools that you hope will prevent your child from falling off the social mobility ladder is nothing new, of course. What’s new is that what used to be free—the human element in the classroom—now costs. Parents of kindergarten children in China now pay a monthly fee if they want them to receive hugs from teachers, according to the
Huffington Post
. Closer to home, many parents with choices are opting to pony up for more classroom teaching and less classroom technology. “The idea that an app on an iPad can better teach my kids to read or do arithmetic, that’s ridiculous,” says Alan Eagle, the chief technology officer of eBay. Eagle has a point, one shared by many well-educated, well-employed parents—especially in Silicon Valley. If you can afford good teaching, why would you entrust your kid’s education to an operating system? Digital skills are now so basic they’re “like learning to use toothpaste,” says Eagle, whose children attend a low-tech Waldorf school (annual tuition: $20,000 per child). “We make technology as brain-dead easy to use as possible. There’s no reason why kids can’t figure it out when they’re older.”
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This is not what we expected of the digital revolution. Technology was not only supposed to free us, it was expected to be the great
equalizer. But simply giving marginalized kids networked computers actually widens existing academic gaps between rich and poor kids. When economists Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd followed the school progress of one million American kids from disadvantaged homes for five years, before and after Internet-enabled computers appeared in their lives, this is what they found: “Students who gain access to a home computer between 5th and 8th grade tend to witness a persistent decline in reading and math test scores.”
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We don’t know why this is, exactly. One possibility is that without parents at home to supervise—after all, poor and single parents often work long hours—kids do what they often do in school laptop programs: use their gadgets to play games, chat, or download movies and porn.

Now imagine what could happen if children whose parents have less money or moxie are shunted to virtual classrooms. Alongside high attrition rates, this is the dark side of virtual schooling. As education researcher Mark Warschauer points out in
Learning in the Cloud
, budget-driven, as opposed to evidence-based decisions about virtual classrooms are already here.

In a state that spends the least on public education in the United States and at a time when increasing scientific evidence stresses the necessity of face-to-face interaction in education, and especially in early learning, limiting kids’ interaction with teachers is a chilling development.
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As more of our interactions migrate to digital platforms, face-to-face contact in education, medicine, and child care has become a luxury commodity. As a fundamental human need, it should remain accessible to all.

FEMALE INFLUENCE

It’s not too late. Far more intractable social trends have been reversed, often with women’s help. At the turn of the twentieth century, for example, 99 percent of women born in an area south of Beijing had bound feet. None born after 1919 did. “The campaign against foot-binding didn’t work immediately. But when it took hold, that thousand-year-old practice essentially vanished in a single generation,” writes philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah in
The Honor Code
.
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After previous attempts to abolish it had failed, how did this debilitating practice change so quickly?

The short answer is that women’s social bonds played a critical role. When a British clergyman called a meeting of women in Xiamen in 1875 and asked them to sign a pledge against foot-binding, at first only nine agreed. Gradually those nine reached out and connected to hundreds more, and ultimately the Unbound Foot Association had ten thousand members. Changing “what was normal,” as Appiah puts it, required several catalysts: Protestant clergymen agitating against the barbarity; prominent intellectuals
calling the practice ridiculous; the return of the first wave of Chinese women to be educated abroad, where they saw that hobbling women wasn’t done; and perhaps most important of all, the growth of organizations whose female members pledged not to bind their daughters’ feet or allow their sons to marry women whose feet were bound.

At a time when they didn’t have much political muscle, women helped promote huge changes, often behind the scenes, through social contagion and peer pressure. Similar shifts occurred when women led the temperance movement. And they continue to happen. Whether working to dramatically reduce infant mortality in India through face-to-face coaching of new mothers; to change the rate of HIV transmission in Uganda; to encourage condom use among their female friends in Cameroon; or to keep their aging husbands alive and breathing, women everywhere use their tight social networks and social influence to alter the welfare of people in their literal and metaphorical villages.
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I’m not delivering a “women are wonderful” (also known as WOW) message but rather a last reminder about the potency of face-to-face contact. As we’ve seen, women’s social circles tend to be smaller, tighter, and more intimate than men’s. Why that might be is where this book began. When I learned that women’s complex social lives are critical to their better health and longer lives, I wanted to know why. Exchanging crucial bits of information within close female networks is key, I discovered. But a commitment to human contact for its own sake is also keeping women and their minds alive. Meeting in pairs or small groups, or simply talking on the phone, women pass on essential nuggets of information. They also get a neurochemical boost from the interaction. Perhaps most important of all, women are more likely than men to sustain a variety of relationships, surrounding themselves with people who matter and replacing the friends, neighbors, and spouses they may lose over time with new bonds. In a digital age and at a time when
people are living longer, more mobile, and in many cases more solitary lives, taking the time to build, sustain, and rebuild this village is crucial.

We—both men and women—are happier, healthier, and more resistant to disease and despair if we satisfy the need for meaningful human contact. Our loads seem lighter, the hills literally less steep.
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Genuine social interaction is a force of nature; we all need some, every day we eat. Given the powerful evidence, the capacity of intimate interaction to jumpstart learning and rejig lifespans is not that hard to fathom, and not that hard to integrate into our daily lives. All we need to do is picture what our own real, in-person villages might look like, and then reach out to create them.

The germ of the idea for this book came to me while sitting in a dark Toronto auditorium. That’s where I first heard about a far-off place where men live as long as women and that a digital interface has been designed, in all seriousness, to be your perfect mate. My first thanks go to Moses Znaimer and Idea City for putting these apposite ideas together, thereby jumpstarting my thinking about the transformative nature of our social bonds.

The late Mavis Gallant once commented that writing “is like a love affair: the beginning is the best part.” And right from the beginning my friends and family—and even a few strangers and
their
families—good-naturedly accepted my incursions into their lives. Generous and candid while I was researching the ideas in this book, I am deeply grateful to Claudia Aristy, Judith Berman, Danielle Brown, Kate Browne, Diana Bruno, Teresa Cabiddu, Giovanni Corrias, Mary Coughlan, Joseph Douek, Arden Ford, Bob Fynn, Jessie Goldberg, Fred Janosy, Sylvie La Fontaine, Kathe Lieber, Ben and Kaz Mattes, John McColgan, Giuseppe Murinu, Ginny Nelles, Claudie Pfeiffer, Francesca Pittau, Florence Velly, and Matt West. If their stories ended up in these pages, I used first-name-only pseudonyms for those who preferred them, and complete names for people who didn’t mind being identified. To all those who helped me in my community, including the members of my swim team and the reference librarians at the Westmount Public Library, I say thank you, thank you.

My remarkable literary agents, John Brockman and Katinka Matson, showed keen interest in this book from the start and I
thank them for their advocacy and expertise. This is the second time that I have had the good luck to work with the insightful Anne Collins, my editor at Random House Canada, who read and responded to a zillion drafts and queries with alacrity, good sense, and unfailing good humor. Cindy Spiegel, my editor at Spiegel & Grau, was passionate about the book and left no stone unturned to ensure its success. I can only thank their teams collectively here, but Michelle Roper at Random House Canada and Annie Chagnot at Spiegel and Grau, deserve special gratitude and recognition.